Books that Mattered to me When Young

I came across a copy of this not long ago and was astonished to find how bad
it is, mostly undigested chunks of history about the Hundred Years’ War, with
our hero popping up from time to time to have an adventure. Early on he
rescues the girl who becomes his childhood sweetheart. You don’t hear about
her again till near the end, when you find he’s married to her, and gets to
rescue her again. None of this mattered, because I was really into knights in
armour. I read it every school holidays, which didn’t take long because I knew
which bits to skip.

Ditto, really, except that it’s a much better book, and you only need to skip
the first fifty pages. You get Robin Hood as well as the knights in armour.

The Radium Seekers

by Fenton Ash

This must have been one of my father’s books. I (and my brothers) read it
whenever we stayed with my grandparents. I was given a copy recently, and it
all came back. Early science fiction, a cult classic, wildly racist, but
enjoyable tosh. Our hero and his friends go to South America to look for
radium, which has anti-gravity properties, and battle with a race of cruel
Inca-type people who use the radium to fly, and disguise themselves as giant
birds and terrorise the locals.

Same sort of thing, but in Africa and with diamonds instead of radium, but one
of the great myth-making books, which still affects the way we think about
Africa, I’m afraid. The witch Gagool was one of my regular nightmares.